Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • What’s the Bus Factor?

    I was on a webinar recently and someone mentioned the bus factor, which is a phrase I’d heard before, but not in a long time. Essentially this is the number of people, or maybe a certain specific group of people, who can get hit by a bus before your organization has serious issues.

    Do you explicitly know who is important in your organization? I’m sure most executives think their personal factor is 1, meaning they can’t disappear without issues. I’m not sure I agree, though certainly we can’t lose all executives at once. In one small company I worked in, we never put more than two execs in a plane or car for a trip out of town, just in case something happened.

    This week, I wonder what your bus factor is in technology. If you think about your projects, your applications and infrastructure, do you know who the critical people are and how many are needed to keep things going? Or could everyone quit and new hires would take over. In other words:

    How many people can get hit by a bus before your org fails?

    I think that in Redgate, we don’t have many people that are irreplaceable. We have four advocates, and while we have different strengths and abilities, we can fill in for each other. Likely our advocate factor is 4. We’d struggle slightly if all four of us left, though I think our sales engineers and some developers could fill in for us.

    In development, we move people around regularly, and while they are valuable and great contributors, I think we could work around a large number of them leaving. I have no idea how many would cripple the company, but it would have to be a number much greater than 10.

    It’s worth recognizing when you have people in critical positions that are hard to replace. Do you have a single COBOL programmer still keeping something going, or maybe just one long time employee that knows how the BizTalk server runs and no one else makes changes. Think about it today, and let us know if you think there are single points of failure in your organization.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Admin Challenges Across Scale and Time

    I’ve never been interested in working on large systems. I know some people relish the challenge, and certainly there is a lot to learn, but I’ve always valued my sleep and time with family. I like getting away from work, seeing my wife and kids, and I’ve found enough after hours work on (relatively) small systems to keep me occupied. To be fair, I’ve often dealt with large in terms of numbers of systems, rather than a large single system. For some reason, managing 200-300 instances that have 50GB databases is much less stressful than a 10TB single instance, at least for me.

    In 1999, I was offered a job managing a 13TB database on SQL Server v6.5. I declined that job, and was glad I did. Running that system would have been a nightmare.  I think a 40TB SQL Server 2017 instance is likely easier to manage, though maybe Taryn Pratt would have taken either challenge. I was interested to see her writeup on migrating a 40TB database recently, though I’m glad I don’t manage this system..

    Even if you don’t have a large multi-TB system, the challenges Taryn faced are similar to ones I’ve had on smaller systems, where I was still space constrained. In some places, a 50GB system might be limited in storage, and you might encounter some of the same issues. You also might have the same moving target problem, where the information you are moving keeps changing and your processes struggle to catch up.

    This is the type of documentation and evaluation that I’d like to see more people produce about their daily (or weekly or yearly) challenges. Having examples of what worked, maybe what didn’t, and the thoughts behind solving problems helps others learn and grow their skills. Even if you only write this for internal co-workers, it’s a good learning experience.

    It’s also good practice for your communication skills, which are going to be very important in the new normal of pandemic work environments.

    I’d love to publish more stories like this, of how you solved the challenges you face as a developer or DBA. If you can write about things, send me a draft. If you need help anonymizing things for your employer, I’m happy to help. If you don’t want to do this publicly, at least consider documenting this type of effort internally. Others might learn, and you’ll have a nice item to present to your boss at review time.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Summer Reading

    I love to read. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve almost always had books nearby. In fact, I used to go to the PASS Summit with 5-6 books in my suitcase, just in case I went on a reading spurt while I was there. I’ve actually finished 4 or 5 books during that trip.

    Every year, I used to love to see Paul Randal’s summary of his reading (2019 here). While I don’t do the data analysis that Paul does, his past posts did inspire me to use GoodReads and track my own reading. Last year, I read 128 books, most of which were fiction. I lean that way, as a way to escape from the chaos of life. So far this year I’m up to 57, though most of that was my sabbatical and the early pandemic times. Now I’m busy and slowing down the reading.

    We’re nearing the end of summer, a time when I’ve usually read less as I’m outdoors more. Perhaps that’s the same for many of you, but it will get cold at some point, and I assume most of you will find free time to enjoy a little reading.

    Today I’m wondering if there are books you recommend for people to read in the technology area. What books have you enjoyed that are based around technology?

    I ran across a post from Frank Denneman, asking about your favorite tech novel. I’ve read a few on his list, and added a couple others to my list. I also listened to Kendra’s podcast on software development, where she mentions the summer book club from IT Revolution where people are reading The Unicorn Project. I do recommend that one and The Phoenix Project.

    Give us a recommendation today if you have one for a novel that you think of when I write “technological thriller.” Fiction or non-fiction.

    I’ll leave two here that I enjoyed. Cryptonmicon from Neil Stephenson. It’s an interesting look at encryption and technology. The other one that comes to mind when I think of technology novels is Ready Player One. Maybe because I grew up in the 80s, but the whole idea of learning, living, and working in a computer reality, while still using computers to do things, was very enjoyable. If you saw the movie, read the book. It’s much better.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Location Data Privacy

    I caught a post from Bruce Schneier that references an article about a company collecting location data from numerous apps (WSJ, AndroidAuthority). This is legal, though the company has ties to the US government. As expected, there are people upset with this tracking, and we don’t have a list of applications.

    Apparently a company, Anomaly Six, provides some tracking code to app developers, whom are paid to include this in their apps. I wonder if this for specific companies or contractors. The former is bad, but if the latter, do the clients know their contractor is including this code? I suspect many software development tools wouldn’t necessarily flag this, if a client even bothered to review the code they were provided.

    This does seem creepy, and disturbing to have someone tracking your code. However, the data is supposedly anonymized, meaning that they know a phone was moved through “these” locations, but they don’t know who knows the phone. I assume the government could actually get a warrant and track your phone if you were suspected of some crime, so is this bad?

    I can’t quite think of why I dislike this, but I do. Perhaps this is to perform some sort of traffic analysis? Either physical movement of individuals or maybe the correlation of cell phone location with other data? Maybe they look for how often phones come into contact with each other? There are likely lots of uses for this anonymous data that could be useful to planners, but I also think there could be lots of more open ways of getting this data, such as asking for it from mobile providers.

    This feels like yet another place where the US is woefully disrespectful of data about humans. We seem to be way behind other countries, and it’s distressing to me. I hope that we start to enact a framework of legislation to give people more rights over this data, but I’m not sure that I will see that happen anytime soon.

    Steve Jones